So You Just Facebook All Day? Screenshots and Social Media Marketing

Social media marketers are often misunderstood. When I describe what I do as ‘social media’ my friends and family immediately start the jokes about browsing Facebook all day and getting paid for it. But as fellow social media marketers know, it’s not just nyan cat and double rainbow memes ALL the time…

One of my favorite tools for the job is the screenshot. Screenshots fit into all aspects of social media marketing (including proving you really DO work) from content creation, capturing customer feedback, to showing campaign results of your hard work! Here are just a few ways I’ve found them to be helpful.

Content creation

Screenshots are invaluable when it comes to content creation. You can grab images from the web, re-purpose customer content, or combine images to make the perfect visual element for your social posts.

It’s also important to make sure your images are sized right for each social network; I created a custom fixed region preset in Snagit which allows me to capture images in the right size from the start! For example, I have created a preset for Twitter share images. I assigned a hotkey so I know when I press CTRL + T I’m going to get a capture box exactly the size needed for a Twitter share image! No unexpected cropping!

Content feedback

Screenshots are a great way to give quick, clear feedback. When drafting social content our team regularly uses screenshots to share our ideas or suggest changes and edits. This eliminates a lot of back and forth communications.

How-tos

When responding to customers through our social channels, it’s often much faster to show rather than tell. I take a quick screenshot to show people how and where to access certain settings within a product.

Customer feedback

Screenshots are a great way to capture customer interactions to share internally. This is especially true if you’re using a tool that not everyone has access to. For example, we use Sprout Social to manage our social media accounts and not everyone has a login. I can easily grab the conversation history and send it off to our marketing team to follow up on a customer story, or just give the product team an example of how people are using a specific feature and how they like (or do not like) it!

These are just a few simple ways to get started using screenshots for social media marketing. What have you tried? Have a creative idea you’d like to share? Leave it in the comments below! And be sure to check out the Snagit free trial to see what you’re missing!

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